Friday, 21 April, 2017

Wednesday, 12 April, 2017

The Fate of the Furious, or Fast & Furious 8, opens in Australian cinemas today. It took me a while to get into the franchise, fast car films aren’t usually my thing, but it has an appeal. Maybe the same sort of appeal that the James Bond films used to have.

Wednesday, 8 March, 2017

It’s been a while since I last looked in on the work of Sydney based photographer and filmmaker Jack Toohey. Well over six years, as it happens. These days he can also be found on Instagram, where the above photo comes from.

Although work on the production had started in earnest in 1945, eight months in, the Walt Disney Company ran into financial problems. It wasn’t until 1999, when Disney’s nephew, Roy E. Disney, was working on Fantasia 2000, that the project was rediscovered.

I know films can take a long time to make, but a lead time of nearly sixty years must be a record. A story about a young girl in search of true love, you can watch Destino here. It makes me wonder how many other part completed film projects there are, started by well known filmmakers, that sit, forgotten, in cupboards somewhere.

Monday, 6 March, 2017

Directors Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo del Toro, Paul Greengrass, and Lawrence Kasdan, examine the impact World War II had on cinema, and the effect cinema had on the conflict, in Five Came Back, a three part documentary produced by Netflix.